Meet the Benghazi lobby

Three months ago Benghazi was a scandal simmering mainly in conservative circles. Now it’s so front-and-center that the White House is opening up its email inbox to explain the talking points that ignited the controversy in the first place.

That’s a long way for a scandal to travel – from partisan anger to national conversation – and one that can be explained only in part by Republican enthusiasm for the story.

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Behind the scenes, a loose network of conservative groups and activists have been lobbying House and Senate Republicans for months to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya, urging members of Congress in meetings, letters and in social media to keep the heat on President Barack Obama.

The strategy kept the issue alive, so when a whistleblower stepped forward last week, it was primed for primetime.

Rep. Frank Wolf told POLITICO the outside groups, especially those with retired military and special forces members, were instrumental to raising the issue’s national profile.

“The outside groups have made all the difference in the world,” said the Virginia Republican, who has been a major support of forming a select committee to investigate what happened in Benghazi.

The third party groups and activists haven’t been working in a vacuum. There was a perfect political storm brewing: House Republicans welcomed the fight with Obama, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa gladly became the public face of the attacks, and Senate Republicans were eager to tie former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the incident as she contemplates a 2016 presidential run.

And now Benghazi is getting front-page attention from national media and big-name Republicans like Dick Cheney have pounced on recent revelations the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and White House were more intimately involved in drafting a public response to the attack than previously thought.

The White House responded directly Wednesday, releasing a binder of internal emails on the issue.

The outside group’s pressure campaign has been a multi-pronged offensive with ex-military officials rallying the grassroots base while Washington operatives at American Crossroads, Citizens United and others have mounted an inside-the-Beltway campaign with online videos, letters to Congress and Twitter activity.

“This was an attack on American sovereign soil. America has a history of aiding those Americans that are taking fire,” said Scott Taylor, former Navy SEAL and OPSEC president, of the importance of getting to the answer of what happened in Benghazi and why a military response wasn’t initiated.